Assessment Task 3A Sound/Ambience

John Cage’s central philosophy he believes in is clearly demonstrated “the purpose of this purposeless music would be achieved if people learned to listen, that when they listened they might discover that they preferred the sounds of everyday life to the ones they would presently here in the musical program.”, (Carroll, 1994) Cage’s argument is similar to the view of the minimalists’, “… by stripping away the inessential, you strengthen the central idea and make it much more powerful”, (Rohe, 1886)The sound notation I created is based on John Cage’s Fontana Mix and the concept behind it is an orchestra playing in the traffic. It is sounds recorded from the streets of Sydney create an orchestra of noise.

Both consistent and background sounds can be heard. The consistent sounds include the sound of cars and buses driving pass in both direction of the road captured from the top of the bridge near the central station. The background sounds are the sound of train riding pass, pedestrian walking pass and wind noises. The 30 seconds clip were captured during the evening where less pedestrian and cars to be around, which enable a more focused consistent sounds and less background noises from pedestrians and traffic.

The 30 x 5 grid represents the 30 seconds of the sound clip. The thick straight line on the middle of the grid indicates the volume of the whole clip. The lines are broken into 3 phases according to the volume of the clip. The wavy think line underneath the volume line representing the frequency of car driving pass and the thin wavy lines representing the volume of the car noise. The dots representing background noise.

My decision to record the areas around the Central station was for the idea of recording a sound clip from on top of bridge which enable sound to be captured on both direction of traffic, amplified sound of cars driving pass the tunnel under the bridge and low traffic area. It allows me to captured a sound clip which can be closely compare to wave sound of approaching and breaking on the beach.